CARLSBAD  Max Wilson is like most 9-year-olds. He likes to play with his friends, skateboard, ride roller coasters and play video games.

Where Wilson differs is that he can run 1,500 meters in less than 5 minutes, which he did at the USA Youth Outdoor Track & Field Championships on July 3, finishing in 4:58.23 to win the Bantam Boys division, representing his San Diego SoCal Roadrunners club.

You can say that Max, to borrow from Bruce Springsteen, was born to run.

He started when he was 6, running at Carrillo Elementary School in Carlsbad.

“There’s a running club at my school, and every time you run 5 miles, you get a foot charm,” Max said. “It’s a plastic foot that comes in different colors and you put them on a necklace and wear it.”

Since that time three years ago, his motivations have changed.

“Now I like running. ... I wasn’t that good at the beginning. It would take me a week to run 5 miles. And then I got into it and kept doing it every day, and that’s how I got better at it.”

Much better. And now national championship better.

Some of Max’s other running accomplishments:

• He’s won the Junior Carlsbad 1-mile the last two years in his age group. Not content, this year he also ran with his younger sister in the half-mile race, in which she finished seventh. Not done, he returned the next day and ran in the Carlsbad 5000, finishing in 19:53. He placed 115th among men in the 29-and-under division.

• He won the 2010 Oceanside Turkey Trot (mile) in the 8-year-old division in 5:46, or 27 seconds faster than the second-place finisher.

• He finished fifth at the Cross Country nationals in Hoover, Ala., last year, running against kids two and three years older, even though he started training with his team a week before qualifying races.

“His goal was to the top 25, because he wanted to earn All-America status,” said his mom, Tina Wilson. “Fifth was pretty unexpected.”

Max’s dad, Al, ran track and cross country in high school in Boston, where Max was born before moving with the family when he was 2. But Al Wilson said the athletic ability comes from Max’s mom.

“She played tennis in college and was a rower and a boxer,” Al said of his wife’s time at Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

“I used to be able to keep up with him,” Al said. “But now I’d have to have the stars, sun and the moon aligned and have someone to stretch me out before the race to keep up with him.

“My high school cross country coach said that to be a good cross country runner, you have to be able to run a 5-minute mile in there somewhere. I was 5-something, but I never got under the 5-minute mark.”

Max says he doesn’t think about much while he’s running, other than maybe having a song in his head, like Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train,” which he heard just before winning one race, or Anberlin’s “The Feel Good Drag.”